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Rolling the ladder up behind us

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Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#81

Post by kevmo314 »

stego-tech wrote: post #57
kevmo314 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair but not a convincing argument if you're seeking to show that the pot is boiling. I don't believe it is and writing off the rebuttal is akin to "well it's boiling, just trust me".

> I don't believe it is and writing off the rebuttal is akin to "well it's boiling, just trust me". Which would be a fair counter-argument to have if so many of you (and people like you) weren't also trying to drag those of us looking to escape back into the fucking pot . If you want to sit and boil, fine, but for chrissakes let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that. Your staunch re…

> let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that

Ok? Who is stopping you? Nobody here is prohibiting you from continuing to write code by hand and doing whatever you wish. Certainly if you're going to assert that that's criminal, of course I'm not interested in your vinegar.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#82

Post by WalterBright »

AnIrishDuck wrote: post #70
WalterBright wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what if 62% wanted two seaters? Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns. Sounds smart, right? What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population chang…

There were ... many other factors involved in the gas shortages of the 70s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_oil_crisis I don't think the history here is as neat as you have laid out. To be clear: this is not a defense of central planning.

I lived through the gas shortages. I remember the day the gas lines ended. They never returned in the 45 years since, despite all sorts of wars and global crises and exploding oil refineries and Hooties shooting at tankers. All gone literally overnight with the stroke of Reagan's pen.

The gas shortages never existed before Nixon imposed price and allocation controls on gas, either.

(Except during WW2, where gas shortages were caused by gas rationing.)

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#83

Post by boogieknite »

edwardbernays wrote: post #78
boogieknite wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this comment implies the real "other shoe" for which im waiting to drop. im ok with nothing. if software dev is nearly completely automated to the point there are effectively no dev jobs then there is a much more important economic condition to address im a basic state-school student who learned the memorable bit about Keynes regarding automating labor which still hasnt come to pass. at the time i kind of found it un…

If you're in America, there probably will not be a chill-out. Look into the philosophy of Curtis Yarvin, whom has been cited favorably by J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel. We are heading towards techno-fascism. The working population which would have been furloughed is probably going to be redirected to the manual labor jobs currently being vacated by the aggressive deportation of "the worst of the worst" immigrant workers…

thank you for the recommendation and holy god this is grim

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#84

Post by Freak_NL »

RHSeeger wrote: post #42
stego-tech wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit motives are a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary). > Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career. Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, o…

> That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"? I don't understand this statement. These things aren't unprofitable. Doing these things a specific way is unprofitable. Growing food is most certainly profitable; but only at scale. Is it sad that a small, family farm isn't really a great way to make a living nowadays? Sure. But that…

The replicator in Star Trek doesn't seem plausible to me any more. Flawlessly outputting a cup of Earl Grey?

The computer-based drinks machine onboard the Heart of Gold on the other hand… Trying to order tea there now sounds suspiciously like a bout of futile prompt-engineering; trying to goad an LLM into giving you tea, but ending up with something which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#85

Post by WalterBright »

brooke2k wrote: post #69
WalterBright wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what if 62% wanted two seaters? Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns. Sounds smart, right? What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population chang…

I feel this is a slightly disingenuous argument - mismanagement and poor planning can happen in both the public and private sectors. The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service. Gas lines are one thing - waiting fifteen hours in the emergency room to be seen, only to be charged thousands of dollars for some tylenol…

> mismanagement and poor planning can happen in both the public and private sectors

Absolutely correct. But public regulation is quite resistant to course correction. Private companies have to face competitors and adapt or fail.

> The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service

The US healthcare system is massively regulated and interfered with by the law and things like people are forced to buy Obamacare and forced to contribute to Medicare and Medicare massively distorts market forces.

Healthcare in the US was affordable before the government got involved.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#86

Post by blooalien »

Refreeze5224 wrote: post #2

This is the true problem with AI. It's with who owns it, and what they will inevitably use it for. Whether it can do cool stuff with code or equal a junior developer is irrelevant. What it can do is less important than what it will be used for. The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs, which from their perspective is a cost center and always will be. If you're not an owner, then you have no control over t…

This is by far my biggest concern about "A.I." and "smart" robots... Not the technology itself, but what the "ruling class" intend to do with it / how they intend to use it. Their primary concern is not "worker productivity" these days. It's "How can I replace the maximum number of workers (ideally all of them) so that I can keep most / all of the profits / benefits for myself (and the shareholders)?" It's always been about profit, but they now finally see a potential to entirely rid themselves of "those pesky poors" and their annoying paychecks once and for all.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#87

Post by AnIrishDuck »

WalterBright wrote: post #82
AnIrishDuck wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were ... many other factors involved in the gas shortages of the 70s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_oil_crisis I don't think the history here is as neat as you have laid out. To be clear: this is not a defense of central planning.

I lived through the gas shortages. I remember the day the gas lines ended. They never returned in the 45 years since, despite all sorts of wars and global crises and exploding oil refineries and Hooties shooting at tankers. All gone literally overnight with the stroke of Reagan's pen. The gas shortages never existed before Nixon imposed price and allocation controls on gas, either. (Except during WW2, where gas short…

Well first, we have this:

> The Jimmy Carter administration began a phased deregulation of oil prices on April 5, 1979, when the average price of crude oil was US$15.85 per barrel ($100/m3).

So, the process wasn't really an instant wave of a wand, or stroke of a pen. We also have this:

> Starting with the Iranian revolution, the price of crude oil rose to $39.50 per barrel ($248/m3) over the next 12 months (its all-time highest real price until March 3, 2008).[11] Deregulating domestic oil price controls allowed U.S. oil output to rise sharply from the large Prudhoe Bay fields, while oil imports fell sharply.

We also have silliness like this:

> Due to memories of the oil shortage in 1973, motorists soon began panic buying, and long lines appeared at gas stations, as they had six years earlier.[13] The average vehicle of the time consumed between two and three liters (about 0.5–0.8 gallons) of gasoline an hour while idling, and it was estimated that Americans wasted up to 150,000 barrels (24,000 m3) of oil per day idling their engines in the lines at gas stations.

So we have counterfactuals: if there was no Iranian revolution, would the effects of Carter's gradual deregulation have been felt sooner? If there was no 1973 oil shortage, would the reduction in waste have made a difference? What effect did people simply believing that the crisis was over have?

I don't propose answers to these questions; they are, in my opinion, unknowable.

I suggest that economic narratives such as the one you propose do not capture the entire picture. You had downward pressure on prices due to deregulation and expanding supply, and upwards pressure due to geopolitics and waste.

These processes do not resolve instantly, they take time to play out. I suggest caution when attempting to derive cause and effect from single events in complex systems.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#88

Post by WalterBright »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #18
WalterBright wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day. > economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will m…

This happens anyway, lol. Go to a car lot and you will see the majority of cars available are black, white, silver, and maybe red. Your car will have a stereo. Your car will probably have 4 seats, not 2. Dealers stock the most common configurations and, maybe this is not your experience, but my experience is that they will twist themselves into knots to avoid helping customers make custom orders for exactly what they…

I've never had trouble ordering what I wanted from the options list. That usually means needing to pay more, though.

If you want custom leather seats, you can drive your car off the lot into one of many shops that offer such services, or other customizations. Me, I drove to the stereo shop to put a better stereo in (back when the factory ones were terrible).

There are many reality shows on TV featuring shops what will custom build a car to your specifications.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#89

Post by WalterBright »

whatshisface wrote: post #64
WalterBright wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what if 62% wanted two seaters? Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns. Sounds smart, right? What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population chang…

Doesn't every nationwide firm engage in central economic planning?

Yup. But they have competitors!

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#90

Post by djoldman »

There are a lot of issues brought up in this post, but I want to discuss one in particular: technological progress and its economic and societal ramifications.

We can say that technological progress occurs when a new method is employed to deliver a product or service with some "more desirable" blend of qualities: it's created/delivered faster, cheaper, with a more desirable mix of resource inputs, and/or results in a more valuable/desired output.

Sometimes it's quite obvious when a technology is superior to another as almost all the qualities of it are advantageous: it's made faster, less expensively, and the result is better with such a gap between it and the old way that there's just no denying that the new way is better.

Sometimes the new technology is really a mix of qualities. Let's focus on the mix that generally gets the most attention: the new way is faster/cheaper but the output is not of a higher quality. Sometimes this new way of cheaper+faster but lower quality "wins out" and the consumer prefers it.

And now the crux of it: why is it so common that discussion concerning these shifts is rooted in everything except the consumer?

An imperfect and potentially flawed example: a bunch of consumers have decided that they'd rather pay less for a shirt or shoe that will fall apart faster than more for one that lasts longer. The old way of making a superior product still exists and some consumers still prefer it but most do not.

Fundamentally, this is a shift that is rooted in the perception, true or not, of the consumer that the new way is more desirable.

Some folks are not happy with the higher prices of the outputs of old ways of doing things or the effects that the new ways have on jobs, the economy, and/or society.

Fundamentally, this has to do with consumer preference and that's where any blame should be meted out.

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